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'Unfair' deportation from Canada threatens to rip apart family

Because he once arranged contacts between El Salvador's armed rebels and the foreign press, Oscar Vigil is to be kicked out of Canada.

Oscar Vigil, a leading member of Canada’s Hispanic community, faces deportation, which will separate him from his wife Carolina Teves, right, and their three children. (David Cooper / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

A leading member of Canada’s Hispanic community faces deportation and the probable breakup of his family because he once acted as an informal liaison arranging contacts between armed rebels and foreign journalists covering the civil war that convulsed El Salvador during the 1980s.

“I think this is extremely unfair,” said Vilma Filici, former president of the Canadian Hispanic Congress, referring to the impending deportation of reporter and community activist Oscar Vigil, 48.

“Oscar is an incredible human being. He has done an incredible amount of work on behalf of the Latin community. He is not a danger to the public. He’s an asset to Canada.”

Vigil, who has been in Canada for more than a decade, has been ordered to leave as soon as the Salvadoran consulate in Toronto can issue him a passport. He has no Canadian travel documents.

Following a series of unsuccessful appeals, the final decision to deport Vigil was taken by Citizenship and Immigration Canada this past February, even though it will almost certainly result in the breakup of his family.

“They are not considering the human aspect at all,” says Filici. “One of the objectives of the immigrant act is the unification of families.”

Vigil’s wife, Carolina Teves, and their three children — a son aged 24 and two daughters aged 20 and 17 — were granted refugee status in Canada and became citizens earlier this year.

An attempt by Teves to sponsor her husband for Canadian residence was rejected by immigration officials, along with a series of other efforts by his lawyer to counter a ministry ruling that declared him inadmissible to Canada.

According to lawyer Steve Foster, who is handling the case pro-bono, Vigil has been snared by an extremely broad provision of Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act that bars admission to anyone who has ever belonged to an organization that “engages, has engaged or will engage in” the subversion of a government by force (or, in the case of a democratic government, by any means at all, forceful or otherwise).

“That’s the hook they’ve caught him on,” said Foster. “The act would catch Nelson Mandela in the same way.”

“There is no legal solution,” he said. “There is only a political solution.”

A spokeswoman for Citizenship and Immigration Canada was unable to say whether Alexander was likely to intervene but she acknowledged he has that authority.

“It’s true,” she said. “Minister Alexander does have the power to grant exemptions in certain cases.”

Vigil has worked as a journalist for a variety of Hispanic publications here and also served for many years as the correspondent in Canada for La Prensa Grafica, a large Salvadoran newspaper. He has also been a prominent activist working on behalf of Canada’s Latino community.

From 2010 to 2013, Vigil served as executive director of the Canadian Hispanic Congress and is current head of the Hispanic Canadian Heritage Council.

Photographs taken in 2010 show him meeting with then-Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney to present arguments against a controversial Canadian decision to impose a visa requirement on Mexican visitors, a decision that has soured Canadian-Mexican relations.

But, says Vigil, none of these factors — neither his family life nor his community work — appeared to carry any weight when immigration officials earlier this year rejected his appeal to have his deportation overturned on humanitarian and compassionate grounds.

“None of this came out,” he told the Toronto Star. “My wife has two choices, to stay here with our kids or to come to El Salvador with me. This is the drama — a family drama.”

Vigil was a university student in El Salvador during the late 1980s and, like many others, got caught up in the civil war then raging through the country, pitting leftist rebels known as the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front against the country’s U.S.-backed government and its often brutal army.

Working as a journalist, Vigil sometimes arranged contacts between foreign journalists and the rebels, and he briefly served as the FMLN’s press secretary in 1992 after the guerrillas laid down their arms and morphed into a legitimate political party. Because of repeated death threats from right-wing elements, Vigil and his family fled to Canada in 2001 and sought refugee status.

Roughly 70,000 civilians died in the Salvadoran conflict, which lasted from 1979 to 1992, almost all of them victims of abuses and atrocities committed by the army or by right-wing death squads funded by the country’s land-owning oligarchy.

Following the war, a truth and reconciliation commission blamed the army and other right-wing security forces for 95 per cent of the carnage and the FMLN for just 5 per cent.

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